If in Canalis we have the false poet, reserving his meager inspiration and putting it behind a dam so that it can flow, foam and sound for a few minutes in order to seem like a cascade, the man used to taking advantage of his laboriously wrought literary successes to serve his political ambitions, the man with material interests who is in love with money, medals, pensions and honors, despite his elegiac attitudes and pose as an angel who misses being in heaven, Lucien de Rubempré shows us the poet who is lazy, frivolous, oblivious, capricious, and as nervous as a woman, incapable of prolonged effort, without moral force, living in the hooks of actresses and courtesans, a puppet whose strings the terrible Vautrin, under the pseudonym Carlos Herrera, pulls as he pleases. Despite all of his vices, Lucien is seductive; Balzac has equipped him with spirit, beauty, youth, and elegance; women adore him; but he ends by hanging himself at the Conciergerie. Balzac did everything he could to successfully complete the marriage of Clotilde de Grandlieu with the author of Marguerite; unfortunately the demands of morality intervened, and what would the Faubourg Saint-Germain have said of La Comédie Humaine if the student of Jacques Collin the convict had married the daughter of a duke? Regarding the author of Marguerite, I will note here a bit of information that could amuse those who are interested in literature. The few sonnets that Lucien de Rubempré shows as a sample of his volume of verse to the bookseller Dauriat are not the work of Balzac, who did not write verse, and asked his friends for those that he happened to need. The sonnet on the daisy is by Madame de Girardin, the sonnet on the camellia is by de Lassailly, and the one on the tulip is by myself. Modeste Mignon also contained a piece of verse, but I do not know the author. As I have said regarding Mercadet, Balzac was an admirable reader, and he very much wanted, one day, to read some of my own verses. He read to me, among others, La Fontaine du Cimitière. Like all prose writers, he read only for the meaning, and tried to conceal the rhythm that poets, when they deliver their verses out loud, in contrast accentuate in a manner intolerable to everyone, but which delights them alone, and we had together, on this point, a long discussion, which, like always, served only to cause each of us to persist in our particular opinion.